


I'm Always Walking As Somebody Else

by articulatez



Category: Fallout: New Vegas
Genre: Gen, Non-Binary Courier (Fallout), Past Drug Addiction
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-06
Updated: 2021-03-09
Packaged: 2021-03-19 05:22:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,700
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29869782
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/articulatez/pseuds/articulatez
Summary: "Sorry to deny you a moment of primate triumph, but you'll have to go elsewhere to sound your barbaric yawp."A newly resurrected, middle-aged courier walks a desert tensed for war in search of the man that laid them in a shallow grave. Some jobs were never worth the hassle. Some masks crack under the pressure. Some sins must be purged in fire.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 1





	1. Chapter 1

Yeti stalked the tumbling dreamlands, catching at the pieces of memories filtering into consciousness. Broken glass images that didn’t fit evenly back into one succinct image, blood in the cracks, a gun wrested from their hands. A mountain that overshadowed the desert basin. An enormous and many-headed grizzly loped on one path. A woman in rags pushed a cart of disembodied, oozing hands on the other. “... you’re… bad luck… Truth is… the game… you’re bad luck--”

They woke near naked, and they woke panicking. A flimsy white, uch, dress, a medical suit. Heart in palpitations that threatened to knock them out again, the room spun like a bucking brahmin at a California rodeo. They lowered themself unsteadily to the creaking wood boards, knocking an array of metal tools and their own IV stand down in their frantic need to arm themself. Now they had a scalpel in their sweaty left hand.

“I see you’re awake,” the man said, white-haired and smiling all genteel.

The room oriented. Not a hospital, reeking of turpentine and codeine. A home. Peeling wallpaper. Cozy armchair. Vit-o-matic, seeing eye vision test, an anatomical human torso built of shiny plastic with removable organs and no arms. In-home clinic, then. Yeti coughed on the dust that floated in the sunshine drifting through the windows and the dryness chalking their throat, grabbed the scalpel handle in both hands, pointed it at him. They’d forgotten the words to greet, floating past the headache that throbbed. Outside the headache knocked an odd, sharp pain that kissed one half of their whole head.

“Easy, there,” the doctor-man said, drawing his Colt 45 and pointing it at Yeti. Finger off the trigger. They exhaled. “Why don’t you have a seat, dear?”

This was easier to remember. “Not ‘dear,’” they corrected him, and collapsed back into the honest-to-God bed. A mattress. Cleanish sheets. This was the life. They closed their eyes. When they opened them again, night had fallen fast -- in the blink of an eye, in fact -- and a clear bandage replaced the IV they’d ripped out.

“Yeti,” they said, turning their head to find with considerably less shock than before that the old man was in the room.

He opened and closed a cabinet. Pills dispensed onto a hard surface, a handful of plink- plink- plink. Old folks took their fistfuls of hemorrhoid and heart medication, stubbornly fighting the effects of time. “What’s that? Not yet?”

“My name, old man, it’s Yeti.”

“And I’m Mitchell, not ‘old man,’” he laughed gently, and brought them a cone-shaped cup with water in it.

They drank it like it was the last water on earth and they were a thirsty devil, horns and all. It was warm but at least it was clean.

Once they proved they could keep down a bowl of overcooked rice, Mitchell was kind enough to let them check a goddamn mirror. 

“It may be a bit of a shock,” he warned them. “Two bullets at point blank range, it’s incredible you had any face left to stitch together.”

Yeti brought the handheld mirror to bear and met themself once more. Words failed, again, not because of an impenetrable fog but because they could no longer read their own expression. They were themself; black, beautifully dark-skinned, their signature devil horns cut due for a buzz and a fresh dye. But they were not entirely themself, having left some pieces in a shallow grave. One stitch connected the corner of their mouth to the skin right below their earlobe. Three more traced vertical paths, intersecting, carved to the neck where age and sun were beginning to turn their throat into a turkey wattle. The right side of their face was marred in red abrasions and deep purple bruises.

If they only had their glasses, maybe they’d see something other than the tears blurring their sight. Yeti had no eyebrows or eyelashes, having compulsively ripped them off in manic Jet and buffout binges some years ago, so they looked in shock instead of what truly burned through every thread and cut and fiber of what remained of Yeti Junebug Campbell: rage.


	2. Chapter 2

The first time Yeti was properly robbed and left to die, the stupid fuck that was killing them was righting a perceived wrong. Only, Yeti didn’t remember they even had his kid’s damn penicillin until he produced them out of Yeti’s clothes in a footlocker, his face red with rage and screaming, and a 9 iron that bent like the mighty cock of God was swinging in their face.

“Surely you would agree,” they said through the fading haze of cough syrup and gin, “if one cannot remember their damn mistakes, one can’t be fucking punished for them?”

This fine preacher man did not agree. He hauled them out of their cot and onto that miserable, cold shelter floor in Blythe, California, a pitifully sparse town whose pitiful residents did not lock their doors securely enough if one had nimble fingers and a basic lockpick set. He tore the blanket off their body and for a moment Yeti was terrified, clutching their shoulders in an ineffectual cocoon.

But no, he simply beat them, raining his holy wrath on their ribs and gut and face, as well as their back after they rolled over and covered their skull. That man of God beat them red and blue. Red, white, and blue if they counted the lymph and pus that oozed for days. God bless the Wasteland and God bless a vigilante man! Yes, sir, they were familiar with vigilante men. Armed with their righteousness and a club or a gun, these were the men who chased the rambling wanderers out of their barns, shot at their feet if they dared to suckle milk from their cattle, and beat a kid halfway to pissing themself with fear over a crime they'd committed under duress. Under the influence. Under the thumb of those who sold them bottled water when they were out of inhalers and the landscape spun.

That was near twenty-five years ago, and Yeti had survived as they’d survived so many things. This was a whole other animal. You didn't fuck with the mail. Everyone knew and respected that.

They cooperated with a reflex test, an eye exam, a hearing exam, and another bowl of rice that was somehow more overcooked than the rice they’d had for breakfast. Bland, too. The good doctor noticed how they glumly pushed the soggy grains and passed them salt and pepper.

“This is all you have for seasonings?” they said, stopped themself, and forced a smile that stretched their stitches. The pain tightened like an outlaw’s rope necklace. Mustn't be rude, though politeness hurt and threatened to bleed.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if your frontal lobe damage,” Mitchell said, pointing to the front of his head, “deafened some of your senses.”

“Oh, I can hear just fine,” they drawled. “You’re saying I have brain damage.”

“It’s possible.” Not content with being a know-it-all, he had to be a smartass too, he dug in his bowl of rice and pulled out a bay leaf and a slice of dried jalapeño.

Yeti stared. “Well, but you removed the seeds, see.”

“Uh-huh. Have you given any thought to my request for a quick psychiatric evaluation?”

“What lies in my mind might frighten you, doctor,” they said, drowning the rice in salt and cracked pepper. If their heart burned later, well, at least it'd distract from their face. “However, I am so, so touched by your care in bringing this corpse back to working order that yes, I will consent.” They paused to crack their knuckles. “May I use your restroom, good sir?”

Excused from having to finish that sorry excuse of a meal, Yeti retreated to his washroom. A pull chain toilet with a fabric toilet seat cover, most likely connected to a septic tank. A shower and a sink, both with hot and cold water. Yeti unzipped the borrowed vault suit down to their stomach and lifting off their undershirt, suddenly needing to be truly clean, to wash away the remnants of grave dirt and surgical tape that clung to their sweat-damp skin.

To their surprise, they found few bruises under the horrid blue leathers Mitchell had given them. The man in the checkered suit's cronies handled them in the hours leading to their execution delicately. Worthless courier, handle with care. They chose cold water, splashing their face and scrubbing at their chest and underarms with the hard lump of soap in a metal dish on the sink. In erasing their death, covering it in the smell of an old man's soap, they buried their own smell, so familiar to anyone who wandered. They sighed, opened his medicine cabinet, and stuffed two bags of cotton balls down the vault suit, nestled near their heart.

Mitchell was wiping the bowls clean. Yeti breezed past to sit on his dingy couch in the sitting room, the walls lined with bookshelves. The man liked a good book.

He joined them. “So this is called free association. I say a word, you say a word. Don’t think, just say the first thing that pops into your head.”

Yeti pulled on one long whisker growing out of a neck mole, right under the chin, and nodded.

Caught in the web of their thoughts, they were incapable of saying what first came into their head. It was half intentional, Yeti guessed, and half head trauma that made them say the second thought each time. Whatever Mitchell thought he gleaned as he scribbled notes and nodded thoughtfully could only be half truth.

“Dog.”

Bitch. “Whelp.”

“House.”

Robert. “Rob.”

“Night.”

Lonesome. “Life.”

“Bandit.”

Born-again. “Brave.”

“Light.”

A fire. “North Star.”

“Mother.”

Yeti’s eyes flashed. “Your wife.”

He covered his left hand and squeezed, closing his eyes, and smiled at his memories. Yeti wondered if he would cry. But no, that was an old injury, something he had healed through his sage psychiatry. “You’re perceptive. I’m sorry I have no eyeglasses to spare you, then you’d have nothing stopping you.”

Laughing quietly, the sound borne low in their breast, Yeti said, “Oh, honey, nothing's gonna stop me.”


End file.
